Comments by "Archangel17" (@MDP1702) on "Not Just Bikes" channel.

  1. That the Netherlands is flat does have pretty important impact but ofcourse it is far from the only factor. For example I for years cycled to the train station here, however I often was sweating and sometimes out of breath after this just +-3km, this due to 3 (rather small) hills I had to go up to everytime. It is great when you go back home ofcourse, it cuts travel time by 2-3x (faster than by car definitely) and took barely any effort. Despite the infrastructure being overall fine (not as great as in the Netherlands and also not as bad as in the US), I stopped using the bike and either carpooled with my mother or (once I had my own car) used my car. It didn't save too much time depending on traffic, but at least I wasn't sweating when I got to the train station. If this route was flat, I would never have stopped using the bike for such a short distance (and other things too), so don't just dismiss the geography like that, it is pretty important to get this extra amount of people on the bike.
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  2. To be fair to Brussels, it has around double the population of Rotterdam and around +-700 000 people work there. And 350 000 of these workers come from outside the city. It isn't illogical that Brussel might experience traffic problems. And all this while Brussel actually has a smaller area than Rotterdam. In the end Brussels has a population density twice as high as Rotterdam and with commuters this might go up by around another 25-30%.
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  3.  @NotJustBikes  Still not cheap enough by far for me. Everything above €1000 in regards to a bicycle to me is expensive, most e-bikes are still more than €2000. And please don't say that a car is more expensive (yes I know that it true), but it is also more versatile: longer range, possibility for passengers, more space for things like shopping (I weekly shop for both my household and my grandmother at the same time, several bags of groceries), independent of weather, ... A bicycle to me will be independent of whether or not I would get a car, either it would be in addition of my car, or I wouldn't get a car anyway, e-bike or not.
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  4.  @NotJustBikes  Obviously there are other things too. Public transport isn't always too great, for example my boss when I interned in Brussel used a car because despite the traffic it was faster than the train due to a bad connection. And he only lives maybe 25-30 minutes from me by car. I am in Brussel by train in 15 minutes (from station to station). The tax incentive corporate cars have been a problem for a long time, unfortunately no politician really seems to dare touch it. Brussels is now trying to change things, but you don't just turn it around. And to add to the complexity is that Brussels is an amalgamation of 19 different communities which probably doesn't help things either. Honestly I don't really see an easy way to fix Brussels connections, at least not with public transport. The train infrastructure can't really handle much more trains from what I could gathered using it and putting extra rails isn't easy. At least they are now starting to increase cycling infrastructure, but I don't think it will help with the commuters too much. And it isn't just Brussel, I live right outside brussel in the "rand" and we here get a lot of traffic to and from Brussel everyday. Especially if something happens on the highway (E40 or R0). Is it really just Brussels fault? I don't think so. The car centric mindset wasn't an cosncious choice imo, unlike in the US, it was just something that happened and politicians/planners acted on. Unlike in the Netherlands, there just wasn't/isn't a cycling mindset in Belgium (definitely not in this region). Also Brussels is essentially a focus point for both train and car traffic within Belgium. Where as Amsterdam and Utrecht seem to be more to the edge (at least when considering major population centers). This too might have played a roll in Brussels car centric layout. This also causes the train network in Brussels to soak up more trains that might not necessarily need to be there. In the end there just was shit poor public planning in Belgium in the previous generation. And even now this isn't fixed. Here in Asse there have been plans to build a mini-ring to keep car traffic out of the town centre. The problem is that there is a lot of resistance against it. Not because people don't want it, but they don't want it where the politicians want it. It would essentially go right outside the core center cutting off other area's, while a larger one is less destructive (people's homes), possibly better in mobility and more importantly helps reduce traffic coming through for a lot more people. This discussion has already been going on for 25-40 years now. After the first part (out of 3) was finished, the plans for the other 2 were destroyed by the raad van state in 2008. Now they are pushing essentially the same plan again with only minor alterations :(
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